“The desert teaches you to listen to yourself,” says an Arabic proverb. It is a reflection that perfectly fits our protagonist, who is well aware of how vital it is to “be comfortable in your own skin” to wholeheartedly follow the compass of professional ambition—and, if the opportunity arises, to go to the ends of the earth, as we will see later.

On the surface, the career of Raúl Peón might look like a string of daring decisions, well-timed moves, and an appetite for adventure. But to hear him tell it, his professional journey—running from the verdant valleys of Asturias to major desalination plants in Saudi Arabia and water treatment works in Vietnam—is driven primarily by a restless drive: to grasp how things work, strip down engines and rebuild them, streamline systems, seek out fresh ground, and constantly test his mettle.

Today, Raúl serves as ACCIONA’s Commissioning Manager in Vietnam, overseeing the start-up of large-scale desalination and wastewater treatment facilities that provide clean water to millions. It is a highly technical and demanding role, certainly, but also a human and cultural adventure in a place where water infrastructure is quite literally a matter of survival. “In recent years, the bulk of ACCIONA’s water operations has shifted to the Middle East, a region experiencing rapid population growth but facing incredibly harsh geographic conditions and severe water scarcity,” he notes.

Raúl spoke to us from the Saudi town of Al Shuqaiq, the base from which he has been travelling to his various projects. We have barely started the interview when he shares some big news: one of those projects, the Shuqaiq 4 desalination plant, has just been named Water Project of the Year at the 16^th Big Project Middle East Awards. The award recognized its excellence in construction under challenging conditions and its transformative vision for sustainability.

Raúl is a proud Asturian from Langreo, in northern Spain, and he always speaks of his homeland with special affection. “It’s a wonderful region, incredibly green, full of nature, and the food is fantastic,” he sums up with a laugh. He grew up in a mining basin surrounded by tradespeople of all kinds, and he remembers his childhood as an environment packed with industrial machinery that acted as a constant spark for his curiosity: “Ever since I was little, I’ve loved building things. I was really into Legos, maths, chess... I always wanted to understand how things worked.”

These early interests soon translated into several hobbies that forged his disciplined character: he was a chess player—winning local tournaments as a boy—and a martial arts competitor, becoming a two-time karate champion of Asturias and coming incredibly close to the national podium. This combination of mind and body has always been essential to his life. “I’m very restless, I love being on the move. I’ve never liked standing still,” he acknowledges.

This restlessness extended to his academics as well. Although in his youth he toyed with the idea of becoming an astronaut or an architect, he ultimately chose Mechanical Engineering because it allowed him to see the tangible inner workings of machines, engines, and complex systems. But he did not stop there: he simultaneously studied Business Administration, and later completed several master’s degrees—first online, and then an in-person programme in Seville. The logic behind collecting degrees was simple to him: opening up new pathways.

Before joining ACCIONA, Raúl made a brief foray into the logistics sector, but the job did not align with what he was looking for. “I wanted field work, real engineering, project-based action. I wanted to get my hands dirty,” he recalls. When he received the offer from ACCIONA, the decision was nearly instant: “In fact, I lost out on a few other offers because I was waiting for ACCIONA’s call,” he says, laughing.

His entry into the company came with a very clear caveat: he was on an international track. What’s more, his initial destination would be the Middle East. For many, it would have been a proposal to sleep on, weighing up the pros and cons; for him, it was a dream come true. “I had been wanting to work in the Middle East for years. It struck me as an incredibly safe, highly technological region that is right in the middle of a massive boom.”

His initial training took place in the office, learning technical documentation and core plant process concepts. “After three or four months, they threw me onto a site, but I started out in an electrical role, despite being a mechanical engineer, just to gain that experience and technical background that I was missing,” he notes, showcasing his habit of blending in professional English terms. From that moment on, he never stopped moving up: junior process engineer, mechanical supervisor, team leader, project coordinator in Spain and Saudi Arabia… eventually becoming a key player in commissioning several projects simultaneously.

Raúl’s time in Saudi Arabia has been split into two major stints. The first lasted a year and a half, followed by a temporary return to Spain to commission two wastewater treatment plants—one in Muskiz, in the northern Basque Country, and another in Plasencia, in the western province of Cáceres: “The latter was as team leader, which was my first experience running things on the ground in engineering and construction.” In this second Saudi chapter, he has already clocked up more than a year and a half to date. In total, he has had over three years of hands-on experience in the country, split between Riyadh and various regions where ACCIONA operates plants.

There, his focus was primarily on desalination and wastewater treatment facilities. He was part of the teams responsible for Shuqaiq 3 and Shuqaiq 4, two colossal desalination plants capable of supplying hundreds of millions of litres of water per day. To put the scale into perspective: Shuqaiq 3 and 4 reach capacities of 400,000 and 450,000 m³/day, respectively, benefiting more than 3.5 million residents in the region.

His “base” was close to these installations, though “base” is a relative term given his relentless travel schedule: “My greatest constant is continuous adaptation to change,” he reflects. Mobility is absolute, his suitcase is always half-packed, and as he admits, the ability to pack it has become a professional skill in its own right: “I can pack a bag in ten minutes.”

His initial training took place in the office, learning technical documentation and core plant process concepts. “After three or four months, they threw me onto a site, but I started out in an electrical role, despite being a mechanical engineer, just to gain that experience and technical background that I was missing,” he notes, showcasing his habit of blending in professional English terms. From that moment on, he never stopped moving up: junior process engineer, mechanical supervisor, team leader, project coordinator in Spain and Saudi Arabia… eventually becoming a key player in commissioning several projects simultaneously.

Raúl’s time in Saudi Arabia has been split into two major stints. The first lasted a year and a half, followed by a temporary return to Spain to commission two wastewater treatment plants—one in Muskiz, in the northern Basque Country, and another in Plasencia, in the western province of Cáceres: “The latter was as team leader, which was my first experience running things on the ground in engineering and construction.” In this second Saudi chapter, he has already clocked up more than a year and a half to date. Altogether, he clocked more than three years on the ground, divided between Riyadh and other regions where ACCIONA runs plants, before moving on to his latest role.

Commissioning is the final phase of an industrial water project. Essentially, it means bringing a newly designed, built, and equipped facility to life—turning it into an operational plant that reliably delivers fit-for-purpose water under all conditions. It is the moment where theory steps aside for practice. Raúl explains it this way: “Commissioning is the culmination of a project that you first have to audit, pre-design, win, design, build, equip, pre-commission, and finally, start up. That is the moment where all theory becomes reality, the moment where the field takes the lead.”

His daily schedule “writes itself,” as he puts it. He works off a weekly priority list and manages multiple projects at once: “Every day is different, a fresh experience. A hitch, a dispute, or something requiring immediate attention will always pop up, and that keeps things very engaging.” Sometimes it is a matter of adjusting an instrument, other times it is resolving a contractual dispute, or coordinating hundreds of people. On “normal days,” relatively predictable issues arise: a motor that needs adjusting, a sensor that needs recalibrating...

These minor hurdles are the most common, making up about 90% of the workload. But then there is that other 10% of high-impact, unforeseen events. And that is where Raúl shines: “I try to focus on the problems that nobody sees coming, the ones that can break the schedule. The tricky part is making decisions under intense pressure. When the world is going up in flames around me, I can stay calm, take a breath, and decide on an approach; it helps reassure both the team and the client.”

As an example of this composure, he recalls a time they had to extract two water pumps weighing over five tonnes each, submerged 40 metres deep inside a wastewater well. Another time, at the Buraidah wastewater treatment plant, they had just two weeks to replace every single diffuser in the biological system right before the final test. “That requires working incredibly fast, with morning and night shifts, and everything has to be calculated down to the millimetre because you are working against the clock. Plus, you have to manage live bacteria, moving them from one tank to another while carrying out maintenance at the same time.”

These are crises that demand immediate action but also ice-cold nerves: “In commissioning, it is vital to project confidence to the team. If they see you calm, they follow suit.”

This biological process requires an in-depth understanding of the life cycle and behaviour of micro-organisms that break down organic matter. The complexity means constant collaboration with biologists, and Raúl acknowledges he has learned an immense amount from them: “In fact, my direct boss is a widely recognized figure in the field and, at the same time, my main professional guide and mentor.” He notes that the willingness of senior veterans to share their expertise is something he had to get used to, after overcoming the initial fear that all newcomers face when asking questions that might reveal their lack of knowledge.

“At ACCIONA, they do not just look for talent and how to retain it, but also how to share it internally. The support is absolute. There are colleagues who have as many years of experience as I have of life, and if I’ve needed to call them daily during a commissioning phase, they’ve answered and helped me every single day.” This sense of security within his team quickly shifted Raúl’s initial perception of working for a massive multinational corporation: “At the beginning, I felt like part of an organisation; today, I feel like part of a family.”

While wastewater plants rely on biological processes, desalination plants operate under extreme physical conditions: 65 to 70 bars of pressure within the reverse osmosis systems. It is a precision-critical operation where a single mistake can have unpredictable consequences. “A desalination plant is a whole different league. The pressure is sky-high and every decision carries risk. You have to calculate everything with utmost care,” he says.

With no permanent rivers to speak of, Saudi Arabia relies entirely on these facilities to secure its fresh water directly from the sea. ACCIONA is behind some of the largest facilities in the nation, capable of turning arid desert into habitable zones: new cities, farmlands, parks, and entire residential districts.

If one thing characterizes ACCIONA in the Middle East, it is the blistering pace of innovation. No two plants are identical. Each project introduces design tweaks, upgrades, novel technologies, energy efficiency solutions, or photovoltaic integration. Rather than acting strictly as a top-down authority, the R&D department operates as a two-way street. Raúl confirms this: “Every project brings something new, and many times our proposals from the field end up being adopted globally.”

From cutting-edge reverse osmosis membranes to more compact sequential biological reactors, the evolution is relentless. And Saudi Arabia, with its frantic growth rate, serves as a global incubator for innovation.

What stands out most in Raúl’s story is his deep integration into a cultural environment so wildly different from Spain’s, “though without ever losing that homesick craving for local Asturian comforts like cachopo [fried stuffed veal bakes] and fabada [a rich pork and bean stew],” he jokes. He learned to read and write Arabic in just three months, and while he is still polishing his fluency, he uses the language daily: “Speaking Arabic here opens doors. They see you as one of their own, not just another expat.”

He has been invited to weddings, desert camps, and family dinners where meals are shared on carpets, featuring traditional camel and rice dishes. Strangers have stepped in to help him during tricky situations, and he shares anecdotes of ending up in the deep desert with local drivers who possess an uncanny ability to navigate, even in the pitch black. “If you run out of petrol in the middle of the desert, someone will instantly pull over to help push your car or siphon fuel from their own tank—and then they’ll invite you to lunch,” he testifies first-hand. “The hospitality here is incredible. As soon as they know you’re a foreigner and you’re alone, they take you in,” he adds.

The most breathtaking place he has visited in Saudi Arabia? “The Edge of the World.” Known locally as Jebel Fihrayn, it is a spectacular 800-kilometre-long rock formation that gets its nickname from the optical illusion of an endless horizon viewed from the top of the cliffs. “Four friends from work and I piled into a car, drove across the desert, and reached the Edge of the World just minutes before sunset. Knowing that for hundreds of kilometres around there is nothing but desert gives me a feeling of absolute calm and peace.” It is one of those ideal moments to listen to oneself.

Mobility is woven into his philosophy on life; he cannot picture himself static. He openly welcomes the prospect of living in Africa, the Americas, or Australia if work and opportunity beckon. For him, the world is a map waiting to be crossed, and he recalls setting this expectation from his very first interviews with the firm: “Right from the start, when I began talking to ACCIONA, I told them: ‘I want to move, I want to fly, I want to travel.’” Wish granted.

With nearly five years at ACCIONA and a string of completed projects under his belt, Raúl has built a rare combination of technical expertise and leadership skills that is hard to match: capable of directing site works, managing multicultural teams, extinguishing technical fires, keeping his head under intense pressure, and speaking Arabic to smooth out issues naturally.

New career challenges move at such a pace that, as we write, Raúl is already heading towards his next posting; this time in Vietnam, at the Nhieu Loc Thi Nghe wastewater treatment plant in Ho Chi Minh City.

He admits he is surprised by his own professional trajectory within the firm: “I went from being an assistant on a single project a little over three years ago to managing the closure of five major projects alongside the director. It’s a tremendous leap. At ACCIONA, they give you the freedom to develop; nobody is going to hold you back. At the beginning, I stepped forward very tentatively, like a ballet dancer on tiptoes.”

Today, that child who built Legos in Asturias helps assemble the infrastructure that guarantees water for millions of people in one of the most arid places on earth.

His life is anchored by a single certainty: engineering is a form of adventure, and it must be lived to the absolute fullest.